Isaac's Storm

Here, Larson introduces two new individuals whose experiences he will use to detail the horrors of the 1900 Galveston hurricane. The first is Louise Rollfing, a German immigrant who lives in a house two-and-a-half blocks from the beach with her husband August and their two children, Helen and August Otto. The second is Dr. Samuel O. Young, the secretary of Galveston's Cotton Exchange and a meteorology-enthusiast with a fair bit of expertise for an amateur. He lives one block North of Isaac with his wife and children, who are away for the summer but scheduled to return the weekend of the storm.

Larson goes on to detail the tense and dysfunctional state of the US Weather Bureau's West Indies hurricane service in Cuba, often the vanguard for coming storms. Moore, still the head of the US Weather Bureau in DC, is deeply mistrustful of Cuba's own meteorologists, despite the fact that many Cubans helped pioneered the art of hurricane detection: “It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba's own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes than the bureau" (102). In hopes of hobbling the competition, Moore dispatches H.H.C. Dunwoody to Havana, the same politically savvy individual who helped orchestrate Harrington's ouster in 1891. There, Dunwoody works to undermine the Cuban forecasters with the help of bureau manager William B. Stockman, an individual driven by racial prejudices "who saw the people of Cuba and the Indies as a naive, aboriginal race in need of American stewardship" (103). Together, they succeed in convincing the War Department to ban all weather-related cables sent out of Cuba, aside from those sent by the US Weather Bureau—a move that would have grave repercussions as the hurricane moves toward Galveston.

More than simply an effort to stymie competition, the Cuban cable ban is also a racially-motivated attempt by Moore and his cronies to prevent unjustified hurricane warnings that would harm the Bureau's reputation: “Like Moore, Stockman worried about the damage likely to occur through the issuance of unwarranted storm alerts. In the Indies service, however, this concern took on a colonial cast. The poor, ignorant natives were too easily panicked. Restraint was the white weatherman's burden" (104).

At eight o’clock in the morning on the Wednesday before the storm hits Galveston, Cuban meteorologist Julio Jover sends a message to Havana's La Lucha newspaper, stating, "We are today near the center of the low pressure area of the hurricane" (111). To Stockman, this is yet more evidence of the Cubans' alarmist forecasting. The storm causes property damage in Cuba but no loss of life. At 9:22 a.m., Captain T.P. Halsey of the Louisiana steamship decides to embark out of New Orleans, in part because of the degree to which the Weather Bureau downplays the severity of the storm, refusing to call it a hurricane.

Later that morning, the storm moves North to the straits of Florida. To Moore and his experts in Washington, "the storm appeared to have begun a long turn or 'recurve' that would take it first into Florida, then drive it northeast toward an eventual exit into the Atlantic. No real evidence supported this projection. […] In the age of certainty, at the gateway to the twentieth century, the expected was as good as fact. To turn was every storm's destiny" (110). So certain are Moore's scientists that on Thursday morning, when the clerks at the Weather Bureau's Central Office in DC compile the national weather map, they note that the storm had traveled North from Key West to Tampa, when in fact it had begun the 800 mile journey across the Gulf of Mexico to the Texas coast.

By noon, Captain Halsey and the Louisiana are in the storm's path. Horizontal rain and massive waves batter the hull of the steamship. Within an hour, the barometer sinks to 28.75, lower than Halsey has ever seen. He estimates the wind speed to be 150 miles an hour: “The transformation was stunning: One moment a nondescript tropical storm, the next, a hurricane of an intensity no American alive had ever experienced" (119). Around the same time Halsey rides out the worse storm he's ever seen, Isaac receives a cable from Washington indicating that the same storm is actually "central over Southern Florida" (122).

At seven o’clock in the morning on Friday, Captain J.W. Simmons of the steamship Pensacola sets sail from Galveston into the Gulf of Mexico, as unaware of the impending storm as Halsey was. Had not the Central Office so badly miscalculated the storm's trajectory, it might have ordered Isaac to hoist a conventional storm warning from the atop the Galveston Weather Bureau headquarters in the Levy Building on the previous day. This may or may not have dissuaded Simmons from setting sail that morning.

Finally at 9:35 a.m., the Central Office orders Isaac to hoist the storm flag, which he promptly does. While the Central Office has revised its prediction of the storm's trajectory and now believes it to be traveling West across the Gulf, it still maintains that the storm is "of only moderate energy" (127). At this point, the only individuals who know of the storm's true character are the sea captains who encounter it, including Simmons who by that afternoon struggles to keep the Pensacola from splitting in two: “Things like this were not supposed to happen. Not anymore. Whether the ship survived or not was now only a matter of luck" (129).

That evening, Stockman drafts a letter to Dunwoody detailing all of Julio Jover's forecasting mistakes, singling out his alarm over the hurricane that recently passed over Cuba and is now headed for Galveston: “These people—they saw hurricanes in their sleep" (134). Meanwhile, Father Lorenzo Gangoite, director of Havana's Belen Observatory, sees a halo around the moon, a sign indicating that the hurricane, though no longer a threat to Cuba, has transformed in size and strength.

By Friday evening, Dr. Young's amateur meteorology expertise is enough to make him confident that a storm of significant size and strength is headed for Galveston. He comes to this conclusion based on the unusually high waves and the absence of strong winds.